Making the Beds for the Dead by Gillian Clarke 77pp, Carcanet Press £6.95

A garden is a mood, Rousseau said; my garden is a playground of moody learners. Various birds hatch and fledge in it. I traffic on their parents' hunger all winter with hand-outs, conditioning them into trust. By May, the garden's grown adolescent with bird life: a zone of imitation: of the imitative arts of how to sing, what form food-items take, the shadow or silhouette of predators, calls to watch for (orchestrations either to attack or attract). Imitation waxes into experience, to be traded forwards next year within a furious competition for status. They are just like my students.

So much for inspiration; it's all in emulation. New writers must read and let what they read teach them how they might write. When new poets imitate they often try out the cadences and styles of more experienced writers. They imitate their appetites in their choice of subject and form; they tailgate talent. Developed out of an acute, and sometimes touching, trust in a previous poet's workings this process can work as a series of severe, short love affairs. The new poet grows beyond one influence only to be captured by another, and weathered by these into another knowledge of artistic practice and prejudice.

Misidentify the weather, and the garden becomes barren. Catch the wrong teacher, and new voices in poetry become florid, cautious, greedy. Who these young writers (and readers) are exposed to is therefore of significance. Which poems teach them best by example? Whose poems carry a healthy selfish gene of artistic excellence, opening the trade forwards to posterity? It's one of the reasons why reading lists for A-level and English courses become grounds for competition and status.

I don't know who chooses the poems that thousands of young people sit down to read blind in those hay-fevered exam halls. I'd argue that poetry sometimes isn't especially well-served by that necessary process. However, whatever the slight reproof due to poems elected for curriculum or examination, I'd testify that Gillian Clarke is a great deal better a poet than this use of her work may sometimes make her out to be, and reading Making the Beds for the Dead creates a strong case for her escaping the classroom.

Her poetry has been powerfully established within the stronghold of the A-level curriculum for some years. Even her likable website offers tips for reading and interpreting her poems, and a guide to her prosody. You might therefore come to two possible and interweaving conclusions. First, that her poetry lends itself to certain modes of critical reading which are extremely persuasive for teaching the rhetoric of contemporary poetry within examination or course work. Second, that her poetry is sufficiently accessible so as not to be too inhospitable to certain less well-read students.

All Clarke's books to date have an individual architecture in selection and order, one that requires her readers to grasp the book as a conceptual, even a musical, whole. What we have here is no random collection. If you stand back from Making the Beds for the Dead you can spy an unusual and ambitious structure: eight "invisible" sections, some of which are self-contained sequences. The first opens with key motifs of alertness to language, and awareness of war, with the poem "In the Beginning" sub-titled "on her 7th birthday". It's set during the final years of the second world war, and circles an image of "a desert land at war" and her own artistic awakening through the noise and imagery of the language of the King James Bible:

&nbsp&nbsp I see it all in colour, a girl my age&nbsp&nbsp two thousand years ago, or sixty years&nbsp&nbsp or now in a desert land at war, squatting&nbsp&nbsp among the sheaves, arms raised,&nbsp&nbsp threshing grain with a flail.&nbsp&nbsp Threshing with a flail. That's it. Words&nbsp&nbsp from another language, a narrative of spells&nbsp&nbsp in difficult columns on those moth-thin pages,&nbsp&nbsp words to thrill the heart with a strange music,&nbsp&nbsp words like flail, and wilderness,&nbsp&nbsp and in the beginning.

The motifs of desert conflict, and the Iraq war, recur throughout the book, even within an important sequence about the foot and mouth epidemic, the title poem. In this piece she makes an unforced and intellectually challenging connection between the suffering of Iraq and the suffering felt in rural communities of Wales. Not only that, but Clarke also uses what appear to be live prose accounts by rural workers giving their response to the foot and mouth crisis. These plain and moving accounts are snapped into, or traced into, lines within the sequence, and give it, and them, a great deal of dignity and sense of first witness, as in "Hywel's Story":

&nbsp&nbsp "The 60s. I was out with the gun after rabbits, or a fox.&nbsp&nbsp I walked to the end of the wood, real quiet. I looked over the fence&nbsp&nbsp at that secret field between the two woods. I was looking for mushrooms.&nbsp&nbsp Something wrong with those cattle. They were lying down, standing,&nbsp&nbsp any old how, alone facing the fence, heads down, not grazing.&nbsp&nbsp Not together all one way like when it's going to rain."

This makes for honest scrutiny. One of the reasons manifest honesty can thrive in such work, rather than just look swiped, is because Clarke provides such a strong structure to the whole sequence and book. It's the underpinnings provided by repeated design; there is a governing music to it all, a large patterning and a real eye for detail, and the "sound" of concision:

&nbsp&nbsp With block and tackle, grappling iron, axe,&nbsp&nbsp they'd lift the lid off the lake. In a rare year&nbsp&nbsp an acre could yield a thousand tons.

This kind of micro-architecture, familiar to any composer of music, taken together with the symphonic arc of the book, is entirely convincing and extremely impressive, but resists easygoing extraction, or excision for that matter. I'd urge you to defy traditional poetry-reading conduct ("let's dip into the book wherever") and instead walk the order of her mind as you would an expert garden. Gardens are total compositions; so is a book like this. Read her as a whole. Scant service is done to readers of Gillian Clarke if they are guided towards the sound of a single birdcall while ignoring the involved orchestration of the entire chorus. What we should do, of course, is demand the curriculum become less afraid of what poetry really is, and we should do so now.

· David Morley is writing The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing (CUP). He directs the Warwick writing programme at the University of Warwick.